Exploiting radio antennas to pursue elusive cosmic particles within Greenland's icy expanse
Radio Neutrino Observatory Greenland (RNO-G) Begins Installation
The Radio Neutrino Observatory Greenland (RNO-G), a groundbreaking project aimed at listening for elusive particles from space, has commenced installation at the Summit Station research facility in Greenland's ice sheet.
RNO-G, a pioneering initiative, brings together more than a dozen partners, including the University of Chicago, Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Penn State University, the University of Wisconsin-Madison, DESY, and others. The project also involves the Friedrich-Alexander-University Erlangen-Nürnberg, Helmholtz-Zentrum Dresden-Rossendorf (HZDR), and receives funding from the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF).
The observatory will consist of 35 antenna stations, each 1.25 kilometres apart, surrounding Summit Station. The first stations have already been installed, and the installation of the remaining equipment is ongoing, scheduled to continue until mid-August.
Each individual station can operate autonomously, powered by solar panels, and will be connected with each other via a wireless network. This design allows for a high degree of flexibility and efficiency in the observatory's operations.
RNO-G employs a new method of detecting very high-energy cosmic neutrinos using radio antennas. Neutrinos, ultralight elementary particles that are extremely difficult to detect because they hardly ever react with matter, can be used to look inside exploding stars or merging neutron stars, as they can pass through walls, the Earth, and even entire stars.
Christian Stegmann, the Director of Astroparticle Physics at DESY, believes that detecting radio signals from high-energy neutrinos will significantly increase the energy range they can access, opening a new window to the cosmos.
The project, however, presents a logistical challenge due to the pandemic, requiring teams to quarantine at various locations before arriving at Summit Station.
IceCube, an existing neutrino telescope, has already made spectacular observations of neutrinos arriving from the vicinity of a gigantic black hole or shattered star. The next phase of IceCube, IceCube-Gen2, will include radio antennas for detecting high-energy neutrinos.
In addition to RNO-G at the North Pole, plans are underway for a second radio neutrino observatory at the South Pole, augmenting the IceCube neutrino telescope. The array of radio antennas in RNO-G will be sensitive to energies from about ten quadrillion to a hundred quintillion electron volts.
RNO-G is expected to remain on the Greenland ice sheet for at least five years. As one of the world's leading particle accelerator centres, DESY investigates the structure and function of matter, making significant contributions to our understanding of the universe. It is hoped that RNO-G will further our knowledge of cosmic neutrinos and the mysteries they hold.
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